Breaking Badger Read online

  “I’m going to go find out if we should be running,” Tock told Mads before heading back where they’d come from, motioning Streep to accompany her. The pair skirted the giant crater the explosives had opened up and disappeared into what remained of the surrounding tree line.

  “You need to tell me why you’re here,” the eldest Malone brother ordered, folding his massive arms over his massive chest and then having the nerve to wait for Max to actually answer him.

  Mads watched as Max’s smile grew wider. She knew a smile like that, coming from Max, would not end well and felt the need to intervene—she had no idea why. As Tock had said, they probably should all be running. She looked at the brother on her left. But he had his mouth open wide, his eyes tightly closed, and his tongue hanging out, as if he was tasting the air. It was weird to look at, so Mads turned to the tiger on her right.

  “Your brother is being rude,” she said. “And if he expects to get anywhere with Max MacKilligan, he’d better back the fuck up.”

  Slowly, the cat’s head turned her way and bright gold eyes gazed at her, blinking slowly before he replied, “My brother’s rude? She had her fangs dug into his balls not too long ago.”

  It took a moment for Mads to remember that particular fight. There had been so many over the years with so many shifters and humans, it was honestly hard to keep them all straight. But once the memory returned in all its vicious, honey badger glory, she fought the urge to grimace and instead shrugged and warned, “Then he may want to take a few steps back. You know, so we don’t have a repeat incident.”

  * * *

  Finn smirked a little. Almost chuckled. A surprising response when just a few seconds ago, he was ready to wipe this entire island from the map.

  And he was considered the “calm one” of his three brothers. The “rational brother” when others needed to bring something up with the family.

  In all honestly, though, they weren’t doing too badly.

  So far his eldest brother hadn’t bitten off Max MacKilligan’s head. Something he could easily do in his tiger form. Her head was really tiny, too, and would take just one bite. But Keane had been working hard over the last few years not to be as angry-tiger as he could be. A request from their mother.

  “You keep it up,” she’d warned a few years back, “and we’ll end up having to send you to my cousins. And there are very few MacDonalds on the steppes, my son.”

  While their father was “Irish down to his toes,” as he’d always liked to say, their mother’s people were from the Mongolian tribes of the steppes. Tiger shifters whose ancestors had been there long before Genghis Khan had even been born, much less a terror to all the tribes. And although both their parents were several generations American, they’d never lost their connection to the place they’d come from or who they were. And who they were was big cats.

  Sure. They were human, too. But in their bones, they felt like tigers first and humans second. An attitude that they’d passed down to their three eldest sons. Which meant that Finn couldn’t help but see everyone around him as some form of prey. Not necessarily to be eaten but definitely in his way. An irritant. An annoyance. A pest.

  He studied the honey badger next to him. He normally would think of the badgers the same way, except for two things. The first was his baby sister, the light of his life and the lives of his two brothers. True, she’d been a surprise to their mother. A result of that drunken night she’d spent with a honey badger male while mourning the loss of her husband. Yet none of them could regret that it had given them Natalie. Or The Nat, as her big brothers all called her.

  Yeah. She was a pain in the ass. And she always found a way to start shit. And when she wasn’t starting shit, she was getting into shit. But she was amazing. Smart, funny, beautiful, and too good for the world they all lived in. But she was half honey badger and hardly a pest.

  The second reason? The way honey badger shifters fought. The rest of the shifter world had its rules. When fighting your own kind, you kept it to fangs and claws. A rule that worked out for everyone in the end. Wolves and dogs might not have the strength of tigers and jaguars, but they usually had a pack of their own kind right at their back. Smaller cats might not want to go up against lions and hyenas but they were faster than the bigger shifters, and with a tree or building nearby, no She-lion could get near them.

  Then there were the bears . . .

  Honestly, no one really wanted to mess with the bears.

  So it all worked out in the end.

  Except for the outliers. The ones the rest of them forgot about. The foxes. The wolverines. The honey badgers.

  The foxes were smart. They kept their enemies close, using the bears and wolves as their protection. The wolverines could disappear, making many in the shifter world believe they didn’t even exist. But they did. Happily.

  The honey badgers, however, they didn’t play games. They didn’t hide. They were in your face, urging you to just try something. Go ahead! Try it! And rules, apparently, were for suckers. If you came at them with bigger claws and fangs, then they had guns and knives and bombs and the willingness to not only use all that, but to wipe out several blocks around their prey, if that’s what it came to.

  Nothing stopped a honey badger because they were just so fucking mean.

  And despite that smile on Max MacKilligan’s face, this particular badger was starting to get a reputation as one of the meanest of them all.

  So, yeah, maybe Keane should back up a few hundred feet. He did hope to have children one day. Couldn’t do that without his balls.

  “Why are you here?” Max asked Finn’s brother.

  That’s when he heard the badger beside him mutter, “Uh-oh.”

  “What?”

  “She’s answering a question with a question.”

  “So?”

  “That’s never a good sign.”

  “What is at the moment?” Finn glanced at the badger beside him and tried something. “Why are you guys here?”

  And, to his eternal surprise, she answered his calmly asked question. “We heard prey was being moved through here. We came to get them out.”

  Finn frowned. “That’s a lot of firepower to free some monkeys or rabbits used for lipstick testing.”

  She let out a very soft snort. “Human prey. For shifters.”

  Finn’s muscles tightened in surprise and his jaw clenched. He admitted he didn’t like a lot of things in this world, but using humans like Cape buffalo irritated him. And he definitely had his problems with full-humans. He found most of them something to be swatted out of his way like fleas. But just as he didn’t want his kind shot down by big-game hunters and left stuffed in their living rooms, he felt the same should not happen to full-humans.

  “Keane,” Finn called out.

  His brother didn’t turn around or take his eyes off Max MacKilligan—not that he blamed his brother—but his head tilted a bit so he could hear Finn better.

  “They’re not here for us. Let’s go.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure. Let’s—”

  Finn stopped talking. He’d heard something come up from behind him and turned to see the two honey badgers who’d walked off earlier now charging back. The one who had counted down to the explosion was chanting something new.

  “Run! Run, run, run, run, run!”

  Finn shifted back to tiger and ran into the nearby trees. When he stopped and looked back, his brothers had done the same.

  The honey badgers, however, didn’t run.

  They reloaded their weapons.

  * * *

  The cats had shifted and disappeared before Mads could even bother to tell them to do so. Good, she wouldn’t have to worry about them.

  Streep went underground, literally. The rest of them reloaded and got ready for . . .

  A man suddenly appeared from behind a tree. He wore all-black tactical gear, including a helmet and night-vision goggles. All of that for them? Did he know they were ho
ney badgers? No. No way.

  Whatever the reason for such heavy gear, he put it to full use, raising his weapon and immediately locking on Max and Mads. He was fast, but Mads’s team was faster.

  Streep launched herself from the dirt onto the gunman’s back. With her legs wrapped around his waist, she raised her arms and unleashed her claws. Growling, she rammed them into the top of the man’s shoulders. He let out a muted scream; his knees trembled, but he managed to stay standing. Streep’s attack did lock his arms, but his trigger finger was still free. Nelle caught the weapon by its muzzle and lifted up a half second before it started firing. She jerked her head to the side to avoid getting shot and wrenched the gun away.

  As Nelle turned, Tock slashed her claws and blood spurted from the gunman’s torn throat.

  Just as he dropped face-first into the dirt, Mads scented more human males. She saw ten of them racing their way, weapons raised. She sucked her tongue against her teeth and dropped to one knee. Her team lined up beside her, about to start firing, but they had to pause for a moment. Their plan had been to spray the ten men running toward them. Until several of them went down and were dragged off screaming into the darkness.

  The military-trained attackers immediately faced the other way with their weapons raised. Max motioned her team to move away from the line of fire. Just as they did, they saw the big cats ease out of the trees again. They’d moved around so that they were again behind the attacking males.

  Tigers preferred to attack their prey from behind. So all those men facing in the opposite direction were vulnerable. The cats picked their victims and pounced . . . literally. Each brother grabbed a man by the back of the neck and ran off into the trees like a dog running off with his favorite stuffed toy.

  The remaining men began shooting wildly and screaming out for their comrades. But it was too late. There were only four of them left, and Max wanted information.

  Mads followed Max to the hysterical men, and when she got to the one she figured was the leader of the group, she nodded. Mads slapped his helmet off and pressed a .45 to the back of his head.

  The other men spun around, ready to fire, but Max simply wagged her finger. “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” she said.

  The men still didn’t give up their weapons . . . until they saw the rest of Mads’s team surrounding them, a weapon locked on each one of them. Without another word, the men gave up.

  Getting them on their knees, Tock and Streep zip-tied the men’s wrists and ankles and Max crouched in front of the leader. She held one of her knives in front of his face but he didn’t even see it. None of the men did. They were too busy looking all around them, out into the darkness with wide, panicked eyes.

  That was pure terror. Because they still didn’t know what had grabbed and dragged off their teammates. They just knew whatever it had been had not been human.

  “Listen,” Max said, and when the man she was talking to ignored her, she snapped her fingers in his face until he turned those panicked eyes directly to her. She raised one of her blades. She was an expert at handling edge weapons. So she wasn’t exaggerating when she told him, “I can cut off pieces of you and be chewing on them like an old cigar before you even know they’re missing. Or you can simply tell me what I want to—”

  Blood splashed across Max’s face as white fangs bit down on the head of the man she’d been threatening and tore it off his shoulders.

  The remaining men screamed and desperately tried to move away, knocking into each other in their panic.

  Max, however, simply wiped the blood and gore from her eyes and sighed deeply as the top of the man’s head was spit out and rolled past her.

  “That seems aggressive,” she muttered.

  But now the last of the men were ready to talk. In fact, they were ready to reveal anything her team wanted to know.

  “The Malones!” one of them yelled. “We’re here for the Malones!”

  Max looked off into the darkness and Mads knew she was staring directly into the gold eyes of the Malone brothers. After a brief moment, she nodded and re-focused on the full-humans.

  “Why?” Max pushed, grabbing one of the hysterical men and dragging him back by the leg. “Why?” she bellowed when he started to scream.

  “We were just told to put them down! I don’t know why!”

  “For how much?”

  “Three million.”

  “For the entire job?” He nodded and Max released his leg so he could continue to drag himself away. It wasn’t like he could get far.

  She stood and faced the team.

  “So why were the rest of us lured here?” Tock asked.

  Max shrugged. “Somebody’s fuckup?”

  “Weird fuckup,” Mads remarked. She didn’t like weird fuckups. Then again, she was naturally paranoid. It was in her bones. She wouldn’t say she was born paranoid, but her family situation had made her paranoid. It was the only way she’d managed to survive her early years.

  “True, but it’s not like we’ll figure anything out here. Let’s get back and regroup.”

  They all nodded in agreement but before they could start moving toward the other side of the island, Mads heard something coming from the nearby beach. She halted her teammates with a raised hand. All of them had enhanced hearing. The benefit of being honey badgers who needed to hear prey underground. But her auditory senses were further enhanced by her hyena hearing and she could hear even the slightest sound if she focused. The turn of a bird’s head. A squirrel asleep in a tree. Or rubber rafts easing up to a coastline and men wordlessly jumping out.

  “What?” Max asked.

  These men, the ones who’d already been wiped out and the ones still trying to drag themselves away, were nothing more than a distraction. Something to keep the Malones and maybe Mads and her team busy until the real forces showed up.

  “We need to go,” Mads said. “Now.”

  “What do you want to do about them?” Tock asked, gesturing at the three remaining men with her weapon. They were still trying to crawl away, but they were so busy looking around for whatever had killed their teammates that they weren’t getting very far.

  “You guys go,” Max ordered. She still had her blade in her hand. She pulled out another because she worked faster with two. Stretching her shoulders, she faced the three men, but she’d only taken one step toward them when a paw reached out from the darkness and slammed onto the head of one man, crushing it.

  Another paw lashed out, ripping the face off the second. And the third was dragged into the darkness screaming. His screams ended within seconds.

  Moments later, the cats trotted toward them.

  “Those were my toys,” Max complained as the brothers passed her.

  “Let’s move out,” Mads pushed, heading toward the location where the copter was waiting to take them back to the city.

  They quickly cut through the trees but when they made it to the other side of the small island, they found no copter.

  Max walked to where the copter had dropped them off only twenty minutes before. She stood there for long seconds, then faced the rest of her team and the cats, a confused look on her face. “I don’t understand. Did those bitches leave us?”

  “Do you see them?” Nelle asked.

  “But . . . they’re our transport team. How could they just leave us? No one just leaves.”

  “Max—”

  “I mean . . . I’ve never been deserted before. Ever.”

  “Didn’t your mother desert you?” Tock asked.

  “That was different. She was thrown in prison against her will.”

  “And your father?”

  “He was never there in the first place. I learned never to count on him. But it’s the transport team’s job to be here. To get us out. Who just leaves?”

  Mads watched their team leader and finally noted to the others, “I think we may have lost her.”

  “She seems so confused by this,” Nelle agreed.

  “Look!” Max pointed at the c
ats now loping by her, heading toward the water. “Now they’re deserting us.”

  “They’re tigers. They can swim back to Jersey from here,” Mads pointed out. “Almost five miles with no problem. We do not have that luxury. So we’d better come up with something quick.”

  “We can tunnel,” Streep suggested.

  “Tunnel where?” Mads asked. “We don’t know what’s between us and the city. Or even Jersey.” She shuddered at the thought of ending up in that hellscape. “Jersey.”

  “Fine.” Tock pulled her weapon off her shoulder. “Then we kill everybody.”

  “I scented a lot of sweaty men,” Nelle remarked, also readying her weapon. “Enough to accidentally get a good headshot on any one of us.”

  “And don’t forget that we do have a game coming up.”

  The entire team stopped what they were doing and looked at Mads. Even Max finally returned to the moment at hand to gawk at her.

  “What?” Mads demanded. “We’re in the playoffs. We are this close to getting into the championships. But not if we’re dead.”

  “Okay, okay, okay.” Max shook her head and focused on Tock. “What have you got on you?”

  Tock shrugged. “Enough to take out the whole island.”

  “And bring down every government organization looking for terrorists,” Nelle noted.

  “Especially if you start blowing up islands near New York and Jersey.”

  “You’re not even trying to help,” Max admonished Mads.

  Max wasn’t wrong. Mads was known for being a bit of a Negative Nancy when it came to Max’s “Let’s kill everyone now and worry about ramifications later”-type plans. Though in truth, Mads often preferred Nelle’s “In, out, no one knew we were there until they realized their shit was missing” plans a little better because Nelle’s plans meant that Mads never had to limp onto the basketball court at the beginning of a game. Or have bullets removed from her back and neck.

  When it came to Max’s plans, Mads never knew how she’d end up when the night was over. Simply black and blue? Or riddled with bullet holes that required some backroom shifter doc to yank the fragments out of her ass?